Apple is About to Make Its Late Start in the AI ​​race with the Aim of Overtaking the Early Frontrunners

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Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference on Monday is set to kick off the company’s foray into generative artificial intelligence, marking the company’s late foray into a technological frontier that is expected to be as revolutionary as the invention of the iPhone.

The highly anticipated presentation of the artificial intelligence that will be integrated into the iPhone and other Apple products will be the highlight of the event, which traditionally marks the launch of the next version of the software on which the company’s hardware product range is based.

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And Apple’s next generation of software is expected to be packed with a whole host of AI features that will likely make the often clumsy virtual assistant Siri smarter and make taking photos, listening to music, sending text messages – and possibly even creating emojis on the fly – a more productive and fun experience.

True to its secrecy, Apple has not announced any details in advance of the event, which will take place on Monday at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California.

But CEO Tim Cook has clearly indicated in the first few months that Apple is about to unveil its big plans to enter an area that has seen the industry boom over the past 18 months.

The AI ​​mania is the main reason why the market value of Nvidia, the dominant maker of the chips that underpin the technology, has risen to around $3 trillion from around $300 billion at the end of 2022. Thanks to this meteoric rise, Nvidia was able to briefly overtake Apple as the second most valuable company in the US last week. Microsoft also surpassed the iPhone maker earlier this year thanks to its so far successful foray into AI.

But analysts are increasingly concerned that Apple could fall too far behind in the rapidly changing AI space. That concern is heightened by an unusually long slump in the company’s sales. Both Google and Samsung have already launched smartphone models that tout AI features as their main attraction.

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That’s why analysts like Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities see Monday’s conference as a potential springboard that could catapult Apple into another robust growth phase. Ives believes that integrating more AI into iPhone, iPad and Mac computers will increase Apple’s market value by $450 billion to $600 billion.

Monday’s conference was “the most important event for Apple in over a decade as the pressure to deliver a generative AI technology stack for developers and consumers takes center stage,” Ives wrote in a research note.

Apple could certainly use the boost that artificial intelligence could provide, especially for its 13-year-old assistant Siri, which Dipanjan Chatterjee of the Forrester Research team now describes as a “strangely unhelpful helper.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is getting more and more chatty – so much so that there were recent allegations that it deliberately copied an AI software with the voice of Scarlett Johansson – and Google last month unveiled an AI “agent” called Astra that can apparently see and remember things.

In addition to using AI to spice up Siri, Apple could also be working with OpenAI to bring some elements of ChatGPT to the iPhone, according to a variety of unconfirmed reports ahead of Monday’s conference.

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This is the second year in a row that Apple has made waves at its developer conference by using it to announce its entry into a trendy technology that other companies already had a foothold in.

Last year, Apple gave a first look at its Vision Pro mixed reality headset, but it didn’t launch until earlier this year and its $3,500 price tag kept it from breaking through. Still, Apple’s foray into mixed reality, which it has given a twist it calls “spatial computing,” raises hopes that what is currently a niche technology will become a huge market.

The optimism stems in part from the fact that Apple has a history of bringing technologies to market later than other companies and then trying to compensate for the late start and set new trends with slick designs and services and clever marketing campaigns.

“Apple’s initial reluctance to embrace AI was entirely in keeping with its brand,” Forrester’s Chatterjee wrote in a preview of the developer conference. “The company has always been obsessed with what its offerings did for its customers, not how it did it.”

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In particular, the integration of more artificial intelligence into the iPhone is likely to raise privacy issues – an issue where Apple goes to great lengths to reassure its loyal customers that the company can be trusted not to look too deeply into their private lives.

One way Apple could assure customers that the iPhone is not being used for spying is to use its own chip technology, so that most AI-powered functions are performed on the device itself rather than in remote data centers, often called “the cloud.” This route would also help protect Apple’s profit margins, as AI technology is far more expensive to run via the cloud than if it were run solely on a device.

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